UK Wikimedian of the Year 2024

The UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards recognise the work of the community that collaborates with and supports Wikimedia UK. Each award is for a different type of activity. We are looking for people and partnerships within the Wikimedia UK community who have really impressed you with their open knowledge work, especially in 2023/24.

We are particularly keen to hear about people and organisations who delivered projects addressing our strategic themes of knowledge equity, information literacy, and climate and environment.

For individuals, if you know their Wikimedia username please use that in the nomination. We will not disclose real names without permission.

UK Wikimedian of the Year

Fran Allfrey

Fran is an enthusiastic Wikimedian who does much of her work in academic spaces, acting as a voice of encouragement to those who want to experiment. She is also a generous collaborator - recently co-writing an article on medievalism and Wikipedia. Community minded, she supports gender based Wikimedia initiatives, and advocates for sharing information with Wikidata and Wikipedia in her research career, notably the Avebury Papers project. She is also one of WMUK’s accredited trainers and enthusiastically shares her knowledge and insight into the Wikimedia projects.

Honourable Mention - Ruby Imrie and Sae Kitamura

Ruby has worked incredibly hard to help illuminate what happened in the Scottish witch hunts of 1563 to 1736 by focusing on opening up the rich historical data in the University’s landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database. She has been an extremely dedicated, constructive and collaborative colleague to work with and has also contributed vastly to discussions about the future of the site and what that should be.

Sae is Wikimedian in Residence at Trinity College Dublin which is a post she organised and found funding for, and even more excitingly the focus of the project is to improve content on Japanese Wikipedia. Sae’s work with languages has been hugely beneficial, and she contributed to the Celtic Knot Conference run jointly by WMUK and Wikimedia Community Ireland. Sae is also really kind and enthusiastic.

Full list of nominees

Fran Allfrey
Perigrinate Avellana
John Cummings
Ruby Imrie
Sae Kitamura
Lucy Moore
Harry Mitchell
Ellie Whitehead

Partnership of the Year

GLAM-E Lab

The GLAM-E Lab is a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law. It uses direct representation to develop model policies and terms for cultural institutions that are creating open access programs. They began working with Wikimedia UK during the Connected Heritage project, and continued this into 2024 as part of their project to develop a Toolkit for organisations looking to go open for little to no budget. As part of this they have developed an Image and Metadata Handbook, that can be used by any GLAM organisation, to assist and enable the upload of openly licensed images onto Commons using Pattypan.

Andrea Wallace and Francesca Farmer have been tireless champions of Wiki and the potential it has for GLAM organisations globally. Through their partnership with WMUK, GLAM-E Lab have ensured that Wiki is at the heart of open practice in their framework or open. This is something that will have long-lasting and deeply felt positive impacts for the profile of WMUK in the cultural heritage sector.

Honourable Mention - The National Trust

The National Trust took the step to hire their first ever Wikimedian this year, and are recognised for trying new approaches. The fixed-term project was warmly received by the English Wikipedia’s editors, as well as WMUK’s volunteers.

List of nominees

GLAM-E Lab
Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter
IDEA network
Khalili Foundation
LEEDS 2023
National Trust
Protests and Suffragettes
Sankofa London Schools project

Up and Coming Wikimedian

Perigrinate Avellana

Having only signed up in January, Perigrinate Avellana has made over 5000 edits to Wikitionary, focussing on Japanese. The sheer quantity and consistency and dedication from a new Wikimedian is amazing!

Honourable Mention - Jonathan Deamer and Joanne Forster-Martin

Jonathan is finding his place in the wiki world and it's been lovely to see him putting his effort to community organising with a meet up in Leeds and organising a parkrun at Wikimania.

Joanne has been enthusiastically involved with Women in Red, writing biographies and collaborating with others. It's great to see skills learned on her Wikipedia placement in Oxford become part of wider volunteering.

Full list of nominees

Perigrinate Avellana
Jonathan Deamer
Joanne Forster-Martin
Ruby Imrie
Ellie Whitehead

UK Wikimedian of the Year 2024

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